My guess in the printer case is that they both sell printers and offer a printing service (needs a survey to be sure). The taginfo stats aren't that compeling, but do point at shop=printer service:print=yes (since shop=printer;copyshop is frowned uppon).

For the bar, either it's a real business (and spliting it in two osm objects wouldn't hurt) or it's a changed business that got its osm tags partially updated (not too long ago I spoted an erotic shop converted to a pizzeria but only partially retagged... it looked weird to say the least).

Apprat from that... "amenity][shop" is a neat trick, I'll play with it too :)

http://onosm.org/ is as easy as it gets. Enter your town, move the marker to your business's location, add the details (at least category and name), and click "done". An osm contributor will eventually pick up this info and add the business to osm.

Just FYI, we're getting closer to the creation of an "OpenStreetMap Ireland" association and OSMF local chapter. It's pretty much agreed on by the community (discussion takes place on IRC #osm-ie an email talk-ie), we "just" need to do the paperwork.

In "Ireland" we include the whole island, both ROI and NI. It seems to me that Northern Irish contributors are more in touch with osm-ie than osm-gb, but that may just be observation bias. So make sure to ask the Northern Ireland contributors wether they'd be interested in having two local OSMF chapters to choose from, or if they're happy with just the "Ireland" one (which should become a reality this year).

There's a lot of townland boundaries changesets at the moment, including by rather new contributors. This increases the likelyhood of the coastline being broken. There's still about one year of work left, come in and help :)

Do you think you could analyze the changesets to determine local vs remote MM contributors, maybe using the amount of names and POIs added ? I suspect the retention profile would be quite different between these two.

Figuring out how long mistakes remain in OSM (or any other data set) is a noble cause, it helps build (or destroy) confidence in the data.

But introducing a deliberate error in a dataset that is used live and in snapshot form by countless different actors is a Really Bad Idea. A less harmfull way to measure things is to look at changesets that fix honest-mistake errors and draw conclusions from that. Finding relevant changesets is harder, but the alternative method used by these Dutch people is IMHO not acceptable.

Also, tags like "fixme=name missing" are pretty much useless, because that information is already there. Plenty of QA tools already point out nameless POIs/places, and querying the same via Overpass is also very easy.

Thanks for the nice writeup. There are still people on the mailing list arguing that this is "nonsense" but I hope that they'll open up, or at least agree to disagree and carry on mapping.

@imagico for this kind of data, verification is done by native speakers. The more eyes we have on OSM data the better (and providing the initial name:CC coverage should help). If two contributors disagree on Abergavenny's name:vi then we'll look more closely at more verifyable sources. In the meantime there's no point in depriving ourselves from usefull data.

In Ireland we recently got a lot of farmers mapping their fields' names (http://osm.org/go/esz5oiyo-- for example). It's even less verifyable because these names are only used by a few individuals from one familly, yet there's nobody in the community arguing for deletion. I think the difference is that the contributors are locals and therefore the other mappers don't feel "threathened by invasion" like they did with name:ru=Абергавенни. And it's a shame that such a feeling arises in a global mapping project.

I bought a trekking GPS for my honey moon, but the official maps for my destination (India) were expensive and only available via snail-mail. Back to my home country (Ireland) after 6 weeks with a map-less GPS, I found that topografic maps for Ireland were downloadable, but still twice the price of the device itself. Searching some more I found OSM and put it on my device. Started contributing after a few months, including trekking paths that I knew weren't available anywhere else, and was hooked.

Sorry zmmalik, but there's no point in copy-pasting that kind of text in a diary comment.

Please read through both links I provided, and look at the various OSM boundaries that strive to show the current situation with all its complications.

If after that you still think that the current set of borders in OSM are not accurate and neutral, you can contact the DWG to examine the situation. You'll need to provide links to recent documents (not something from 1957...) that show, from various angles (at least Indian and Pakistanese) that the current on-the-ground and/or official status is different from what OSM conveys.

In the particular case of "building=entrance" I agree that it should be deleted nowadays, but don't treat "tag redundancy is bad" as an absolute rule.

Using redundant tagging schemes can be advisable when neither scheme has fully "won" yet. Even when one has, keeping the old tag during a "transition period" makes life easyer for consumers.

Concerning colors, the RGB/CMYK conversion is the least of our accuracy worries. There are lots of physical factors that bring much bigger errors than that. The geometry isn't centimeter-accurate either, so the color accuracy isn't a problem. 3-bytes RGB is the color scheme that most people know about, so go ahead and always use that in OSM.